In the digital realm, content includes any type of digital information that is used to populate a document, a document page, a web page, etc. The digital data can be text, images, graphics, video, sound etc. The Internet is redefining the way organizations create and publish corporate information and documents. Intra-, inter- and extra-nets are replacing the document approach to the storage of information with online, up-to-date web based information. The result of this shift is that companies are more interested in managing information at the more granular content level rather than the less granular document level.
XML is rapidly becoming the vehicle of choice as a definition language for the description of content-related structures. XML provides great flexibility and universality because XML provides a grammar that can express nearly any content. On the Internet in particular, the standardized representation of content structures fosters the development of previously unrecognized applications.
The extensible markup language (XML) has been designed for system integration. XML is a meta-markup language that provides a format for describing structured data. An XML element can declare its associated data to be any desired data element. XML provides a structural representation of data that has proved broadly implementable and easy to deploy. A piece of information marked by the presence of tags is called an element. Elements can be further described by attaching name value pairs called attributes. Once the data is received by the client, the data can be manipulated edited and presented in multiple ways without being sent back to the server. The XML syntax uses matching start and end tags to mark up information. Presently, XML has been applied to the representations of applications data
XML Schema definition language (XSD) is the current standard schema language for all XML documents and data. Currently, developers are required to manually create XML schemas for created XML documents using the XSD language. As more content migrates to XML such task becomes arduous and time intensive. Generally, an XML document is created. To schematize the document, XSD is employed. The benefits of having a schematized document are numerous but include the easier cooperation with cooperating data stores and more efficient query processing on the underlying XML document. Strides have been made to try to automate this process but have yielded ineffective and non-elegant solutions, generally requiring extensive processing which depletes system resources.
From the foregoing, it is appreciated that there exists a need to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art such that the vexing issue of automated schema generation using XSD is resolved.